“Waste Not” is ironically the most wasteful expenditure of attribute points in the game as of this writing. The effects of using up half as much water when drinking from a waterskin can, in their entirety, be replaced by carrying a second water skin. You’ve replaced an amazing pair of perks that we all loved with a terrible perk that reduces the amount of weight in our inventory by 1.12.
Wow, dev team, just, mmmuah, perfect job there. Sorry to be severe about it but the lack of any response to the community’s backlash on this change in particular has been deafening. This patch was on TestLive for what, one week? If that? And it got pushed through without listening to any of our feedback.
Please, I implore you, pay attention. Change this back or find something better to replace Waste Not with, because as far as I can tell, everyone’s opinion on that perk is “Want Not.”
I really do hate to be negative, but I cannot help but agree with you here Kittenykat.
There are as of now 14 ‘likes’ and counting from the playerbase voicing their opposition to this change. And purely as a comparator, we cut the Fast Travel feature from Siptah based on not even a half of that; a mere 5 ‘likes’. Funcom you have stated repeatedly that the game is in active development, and that you are actively listening to and acting upon player feedback correct…!? Then please listen to it now as opposed to ignoring it. We want to retain Efficient Butchery! Faithful out.
Thank you. I was afraid I might’ve gone overboard, so it’s reassuring to hear that. :3 I’m trying my level best not to let my frustration get the best of me and to avoid being negative but this patch is just making it so darn hard. D:
You probably did a wee bit Kittenykat . However, I prefer to focus on the message being delivered as opposed to how it was delivered. And yours rings true in this instance.
The previous perk was changed because, in fact, it was too good especially considering the amount of points it required. It also generally threw balancing off the table when trying to balance other aspects of the game.
While the new perk might require some tweaks, and we’re open to feedback and listening to it, we often don’t consider “The changes are bad and you should feel bad”, “Wow, dev team, just, mmmuah, perfect job there” and other such lines as feedback to act upon.
Please do give the new patch and all the myriad of new balancing fixes and additions of 2.1 a good try (that is, more than a couple days) and then try to share your feedback and suggestions in a more organized and constructive manner.
Survival is a difficult stat to balance because the whole survival aspect of the game is difficult to balance. It has the risk of being either too trivial (food and water being plentiful and temperature effects minor) or a serious chore (much of your playing time goes to gathering food and keeping warm and out of sandstorms etc.). And we play games to have fun, not to do chores.
From this perspective, Survival is a good stat to reduce the need for food and water and for reducing the effects of extreme temperatures. Those who want to do less chores can invest stat points into Survival. But - hunger, thirst and temperatures tend to be major factors in the early game, before players have access to reliable sources of food, well-built shelters and top-tier armor. This is also the point in the game where players don’t have many extra stat points to invest into a “support” stat.
From a design perspective, this even makes sense to a point. Early game can be a struggle, that’s okay. And late game, where you’re in the “Dominate” phase of the game, you don’t want to spend too much time doing chores anymore.
So whatever the perks of Survival, they should better reflect the fact that Survival is a late-game stat, for those players who are willing to spend their stat points there rather than stats with more straightforward applications. The poison immunity perk is a good example of a useful late-game stat. Halving the amount of water you drink is not. I barely ever need to reach for a waterskin in the first place because after a few hundred hours of gameplay I know where to find water whenever I’m thirsty, and all my bases have at least one well, too.
wouldn’t be a good idea to ask players what are their most/least used perks and them work around that?
I mean look at some of our perks right now:
Iron-hard Muscles
You gain a natural resistance to damage [+15 Armor]. this is useless. Just look how much armor players usually have, and how much this perk costs.
Deflection
You have a chance to ignore armor and shield durability loss when hit.
40 points to save one or two repairs over a long time. 40.
Blood-mad Berserker
Whenever your hitpoints fall below 25%, you deal 50% more melee damage.
Do people even use this? 25% hp many times means death on the next instance of damage taken, because its not uncommon to lose 25% of your health in this game. Most people run away and heal once they get this low on health. So its an extremely niche build, in a game where being at low health is almost a death sentence, with little to no payout.
Wouldn’t be better to improve bad perks before nerfing good ones? It surely would bring more positive feedback.
I would suggest an “Attribute Design Contest.” Put the community to work. Let the community work on, and submit, suggested redesign of the Attribute Perk system.
Many people can submit drafts for feedback from other community members (lots of give and take and discussion). Posting Attribute Perk plans for all SAVAGES. Let the community debate these plans.
And then, that person(s) can submit the “final draft” for Funcom’s consideration by a specific date. Funcom has the final say in what they will do with it (some or all or even tweaked, given how Funcom is tracking the stats and effect). I would expect multiple plans to be submitted at this point.
An initial draft is internally tested, (whichever Funcom decides upon – some or all or tweaked)
and if that goes well, submitted to Testlive for community testing,
and if that goes well, to the final live version.
And feedback from Funcom would be invaluable during the drafting process. For example, @Ignasi stated above that the third perk in Survival is too strong and its messing up game balance. Okay, now the community can go to work on ways to make it better (improved, scrapped for something else, or tweaked in a new direction). Again, put the community to work. Thousands of players have ideas (granted, not all good ones, but there are some gems out there that can be tapped to making this game great).
That seems like an awesome idea! Its a good way of checking what the community wants while still having full control over the the changes.
People participate, decide which ones are cool, devs look at the most popular suggestions and make the final judgement. Everyone is happy.
The only possible issue is having too many players out of the loop once something like this gets implemented. Like lets say, if most suggestions are from PC players, this might cause problems for the Xbox crowd, that didn’t even know about this and couldn’t give their two cents. So it would be necessary to make this public to everyone, perhaps even ingame.
I disagree now while farming you will stand no chance against enemy`s period do you Devs even play the game? because your actions state otherwise. Why do you guys keep changing the game?
I see the point OP was trying to make here. This perk isn’t exciting, where the previous perk was. I think the team here could try to answer the question, “What can we have that’s exciting relative to the tier, survival themed, but not as economy game-breaking as the previous perk?”
The waterskin perk, as it is now, not the best solution I think you guys could come-up with. I recommend exploring ideas like, “Quenched Vigor – Thirst decays slower overall, Stamina consumption decreases by 10% while ‘Quenched’” Players who drink from their waterskin will gain the “Quenched” status for 30 seconds that decreases the overall stamina use by 10%. Players can’t gain quenched status when thirst is 100/100 (which can be learned via exploration rather than text strings).
I feel a perk, like the example above, is exciting relative to the tier, but not too overpowered like the animal harvesting perk. The part I love the most about it being it encourages better gameplay by encouraging keeping a better eye on your survival meters to make the most of the perk.
I think moving the 2nd perk to the 3rd perk (and eliminating the 3rd entirely) is fine. I switched up my farming build right after the hotfix that eliminated the freezing problem. I do the majority of my farming in the wolf infested highlands of southeastern siptah and haven’t had any trouble with the new build.
The original 3rd perk was always super situational and I never used it unless I was specifically farming for hides or glands. Even then, i only found it to be useful early on and after playing enough I had more than enough animal based mats just from harvesting random kills. Maybe it was more useful to hardcore pvp players rather than dabblers such as myself.
I do agree that the new 2nd perk is very yawn. This is a problem I have with a lot of the perks though. I think the best post I’ve see in a long time was the one in this thread suggesting that Funcom hold a contest for reworked perks. I think a lot of really interesting ideas would flow out of that and it could be really helpful.
I honestly think they did not go far enough with the survival changes. They should have moved “Hard Worker” up to the 5th perk of survival, or at least the 4th. It is an over powered perk. It definitely was too OP to be the 2nd perk as most farmers were/are simultaneously running the 5th perk (Momentum) in encumbrance.
Which BTW that 5th encumbrance perk, Momentum, should be completely removed from the game. Carrying an entire forest in my back pocket? Or a mountain of stone? Puuuuleaze! That perk is insanely overpowered and should be axed. It lessens the utility of bearers, caravan pets, and camels.
But we all know “real” balancing changes like removing Momentum will never fly as people’s head would explode. Just look at the hell-storm coming from “tha’ communitee” for changes like larger crafting station footprints, removing the passive supply of an infinite stream of fish, etc.
helium3: I think the best post I’ve see in a long time was the one in this thread suggesting that Funcom hold a contest for reworked perks. I think a lot of really interesting ideas would flow out of that and it could be really helpful.
While I think idea-generation through brainstorm sessions are super helpful, we don’t have insight into the technical capabilities/limitations in creating the perk content. It’d be fun for the players to come-up with ideas, but unless you know how to potentially execute them, it’d ultimately be less useful to have a pot of ideas that can’t be effectively implemented. (There is no “idea guy” in game development!)
In game development, it’s typically not the “we didn’t have a good idea” issue as much as it’s the “we executed the best we could with the resources we have.” Constructively challenging game decisions that generate a negative or neutral-trending-negative player experience totally helps developers gauge their design choices and bring that feedback to future solutions.
For this case, I think you wrote it well, which is the perk is “yawn”. I take that as, “it’s not a meaningful choice” and it’s “not fun”
I think another way we can challenge the dev’s approach here: “What perk could exist at this tier that I’d invest to just get it” ie. can we replace this waterskin perk with something that I’d want, not a consolation prize for what I really want (increased harvesting speed).
This has unfortunately been true about 98% of the time.
When you’re gathering stuff for a large project, the 20 (now 30) in Survival was great. And it does help double the chance on a proc of good materials (you get double the gold from Obsidian on average and actually double the gold from gold nodes in Siptah).
But for the rest of the time, you yellow lotus to something else. That’s a problem.
2 years ago I made a case for Accuracy to be equal to Strength. I would do it for Survival. But for the life of me I couldn’t actually figure a way to make Survival worth it. Not without changing some basic gameplay functions. And we sort of did the stick method versus carrot with Agility and Dodge, people really didn’t like that.
Can you explain why Funcom thinks so? Putting 20 points in survival, 50 in encumbrance, and 30 vitality was the farm build. Your stamina ran out so fast when encumbered, as well as you couldnt fight effectively, I bet you the majority of players feel it was in a good spot.
Sure, changing that to 30 points now means most farmers will drop vitality to compensate for it…but the backlash you will recieve when you change the 5th encumbrance perk will break these forums.
. However, I prefer to focus on the message being delivered as opposed to how it was delivered. And yours rings true in this instance.